Dang it All

2007-12-25T21:40:00.001-06:00

Strange phrase related to me at work tonight:

"You know her, she's the crazy one who slept with Gerald Ford's son."

2007-11-13T09:18:00.001-06:00

Big goings on in the Golden household. Kelsey turned 25 last week. We celebrated by taking a couple of day trips. We visited Mepkin Abbey on Friday, where we both saw our very first monk in the flesh. The grounds were also neat.

And Kelsey found herself a tree nook to peek out of:

Then we scooted down to Mount Pleasant for lunch, and zipped up through the historical district of Georgetown on the way home. From the highway Georgetown looks like a skeezy, rundown slummy sort of town. But once you take a few side streets, it's surprisingly nice. Of course, the stench from the paper mill persists, but at least the view is better, if not the smell.

On Saturday, we woke up bright and early (it's been a long time since we've been awake at 6) and drove 3 hours to the Riverbanks Zoo in Columbia. Kelsey made friends with an endangered lorikeet there:

And I made friends with a goat:

A good couple of days. And aren't digital cameras fun?

2007-10-24T12:39:00.000-05:00

Another condo-related discovery:
When the hot water heater in the unit above develops a leak, it's our carpet that becomes moist and spongy. I knew there was a reason we owned 15 towels.

2007-10-20T17:59:00.001-05:00

I made a disturbing discovery the other day. The condo that Kelsey and I spent an obscene amount of money (for us) to buy can be vaccuumed in its entirety without changing the outlet the Hoover is plugged in to.

2007-10-09T14:46:00.001-05:00

Today's selection from "The Best Loved Poems of the American People," copyright 1936:

The Manly Man

The World has room for the manly man, with the spirit of manly cheer;
The world delights in the man who smiles when his eyes keep back the tear;
It loves the man who, when things are wrong, can take his place and stand
With his face to the fight and his eyes to the light, and toil with a willing hand;
The manly man is the country's need, the moment's need, forsooth,
With a heart that beats to the pulsing troop of the lilied leagues of truth;
The world is his and it waits for him, and it leaps to hear the ring
Of the blow he strikes and the wheels he turns and hammers he dares to swing;
It likes the forward look on his face, the poise of his noble head,
And the onward lunge of his tireless will and the sweep of his dauntless tread!
Hurrah for the manly man who comes with sunlight on his face,
And the strength to do and the will to dare and the courage to find his place!
The world delights in the manly man, and the weak and evil flee
When the manly man goes forth to hold his own on land or sea!
- Unknown

Hurrah for the manly man!

2007-10-05T21:13:00.000-05:00

It's like Christmas! After months of self-imposed budgeting, the money floodgates are inching wider, and I tempted fate by buying a new CD tonight. So far, the latest offering from The New Pornographers isn't half bad.

2007-10-03T18:01:00.001-05:00

One of these days, the people at World Market are going to figure out that we just walk around the store to take advantage of their free coffee. Hopefully not soon, though.

2007-09-30T15:27:00.000-05:00

Today's lesson:

Buy more than 1 belt. That way, when your oversized cat pees on your jeans, you don't have to choose between wearing a belt that smells like cat pee and having your pants fall down.

2007-09-30T12:34:00.000-05:00

I think the camera adds 10 pounds to cats as well:

2007-09-28T00:08:00.000-05:00

Most editors are failed writers - but so are most writers.
~T.S. Eliot

I have no clear conception of why I like poetry. Kelsey asked me on our way back from the bookstore last night. When we arrived, she headed straight for the home decorating books. And I put off my usual coveting of the Douglas Adams collection to check out the paltry poetry offerings. A passing reference to Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" had made me realize it had been a while since I'd read it. So I found it, and read it, and realized why it had been a while. But even though Eliot, to me, is like trying to digest a whole block of cheese at once, I still enjoyed it. I just can't explain why very well.

Kelsey does not like poetry. She says it's too flowery and overwrought. Too many words trying to say one little thing. Me, I like that. Perhaps because I spend my working hours trying to "omit needless words," I enjoy it when someone who actually appreciates language takes those words and crafts something beautiful out of them. But I have to agree with my wife. There is a whole lot of bad poetry out there, giving the entire genre a bad name.

Everybody has five or 10 bad poems hanging around somewhere that they thought were the essence of their soul when they were 14. Most of us realize pretty soon how awful these poems (about sobbing hearts and uncatchable clouds) really are. Yet many bad poets somehow missed the telegram. Maybe because poems are relatively short, bad writers think they're within grasp. In order to write a novel you have to be at least a mediocre writer, with some grasp of plot and character. But anybody with 10 minutes and a thesaurus can slap out a sonnet.

But the good poetry, ah, now that's good stuff. I believe good poetry is good because it tells us something true, something about how the writer really feels, it captures one tiny moment of truth and tells us everything about it. "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." Bad poetry tells us how the writer thinks he or she should feel. How the writer wishes to feel. How the writer might feel. Red Smith was right when he said, "There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein." Real poets leave nothing out, they bare it all. Now, they may choose which parts of their lives to write poems about. But once a topic is begun, there's no going back. When Hopkins praises God in my favorite poem you can feel his joy. When Billy Collins rhapsodizes you're in the room with him. You have to be careful reading Plath or Sexton or you'll wish you had your head in an oven, too.

I certainly feel some connection. Well-written poetry makes me feel as if I know some part of the poet. But I still don't know why I really like poetry. Because I think it's edifying? Perhaps. Because I like to stand back and appreciate how artists can make words do acrobatics? Maybe. I really don't know. But after writing all this, I realize that I don't really care.

2007-09-22T09:20:00.001-05:00

Today's joke:

What did the farmer say when his tractor went missing?

Where's my tractor?

2007-09-18T20:04:00.000-05:00

A trip to the grocery store this morning meant we missed the UPS man. We returned to find his yellow and brown slip advising us that he had tried to deliver our package, but had, regretfully, found nobody home. It said that we could expect him to try again tomorrow. But, in addition, if we weren't the kind of people who felt as though we could wait that long, he appended a note offering to meet us "behind the bowling alley at 5:35."

Neither Kelsey nor I have ever experienced this sort of 1) solicitousness or 2) creepiness from a delivery man. Kelsey immediately decided it was a ploy to kidnap her. I couldn't imagine the average homeowner taking him up on this offer. I have had no experience in completing drug deals, but I imagine the whole affair would have "gone down" like a stock scene from "Shaft."

Kelsey and I would pull into the parking lot, wearing shades, around 5:25, just to scope out the place beforehand and make sure the cops weren't hiding inside the vet's office. We'd make nervous jokes and laugh to scare away the butterflies in our stomach. Around 5:32 a large earthtone UPS truck would nose its way around the corner and pull up 15 or 20 feet from us. I'd wait for the driver to exit. Then, after Kelsey assured me that she had my back, I'd slowly step out of our bright orange Vibe.

My eyes wide behind my sunglasses, I'd shuffle forward to the halfway spot between the two vehicles. My hand would shake as I nervously handed the man in khaki shorts the slip he'd left in our door. In return, he'd hand me our 2-Port PS/2 KVM Switch, and we'd head back to our respective cars, neither of us saying a word. Just another handoff in the seedy world of next-day delivery.

Now I'm kind of sorry I didn't bother to go pick up our package, just to see what it was really like.

2007-09-15T10:46:00.001-05:00

A scrapbook of quotes from my week:

I'm an American; I don't need to see something to know I don't like it.
- Tommy Smothers

The history of the world
Step one. You need a lot of water -- from above and below. The water of heaven fills the lakes and rivers. Now add equal amounts of darkness and daylight. while there is light the sun draws the water back up to restock heaven.
- "Mister Pip"

Bless mommy, bless Jake, bless Darryl... bless Kate Jackson, David Hasslehoff, Vanna White and Suzanne Summers.
- Ronnie Simonsen in "How's Your News"

Carla: [about a male intern] You're right; he definitely has a cute little butt.
Elliot: It's almost like it's been sculpted.
J.D.: Who cares? Everyone has a cute butt; I have a cute butt.
Carla: You should bring it in someday.
- Scrubs

2007-09-13T22:46:00.000-05:00

The problem with trying to maintain a blog:
You have to have something to write about.

2007-09-10T13:23:00.001-05:00

One more reason that eels are icky, via the Washington Post:

Remember the science-fiction monster with a jaw within a jaw that terrorized Sigourney Weaver in the "Alien" films? Well, it turns out a similar double-jawed creature actually exists: The moray eel has a second set of jaws located in its throat that snaps forward to grab prey and quickly pull it down into the eel's digestive system.

2007-09-09T16:14:00.001-05:00

I finished reading Tuesdays with Morrie this morning and began C.S. Lewis' Letters to Children. Both books advocate the throwing off of our dour adult mantle and a return to the sense of wonder and glee embraced by young children. As Lewis wrote: "When I was 10, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am 50 I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up."

I am a person who still thinks it very important to act "very grown up." It's hard for Kelsey to elicit belly laughs from me, although this doesn't keep her from tickling me incessantly until they come. And I have a particular aversion to singing or dancing in public.

Luckily, Kelsey is my secret weapon in the fight against becoming too serious. As Mr. Darcy has his Elizabeth Bennet, I have Kelsey, who has no compunctions about splashing about in the ocean just for fun. And who melts into a 5'7" pile of goo at the sight of any small furry creature, be it cat, dog, squirrel, raccoon, meerkat or capybara. Her songs, made up on the spot about our cats Truffle and Marzipan, will never win any songwriting awards, but the love and whimsy they evince are priceless.

She keeps me grounded and pokes holes in my hot air, and I love her for that.

Thanks, Buster.

2007-09-06T21:13:00.000-05:00

Happiness is...

A classic tale of English aristocracy and old money,
Sounds of la Nouvelle scène française seeping out the speakers,
Egyptian cotton pulled up just below the chin,
A glass of chilled gewurztraminer sweating on the nightstand,
A beautiful Cherokee-German princess on the next pillow,
And an American mutt cat sleeping on your toes.

2007-09-02T21:06:00.000-05:00

Looking forward to seven days without work, I plan to take long walks, read good books, eat scrumptious food, polish off the rest of that box of wine that's been sitting in our fridge for a week and watch Kelsey beat me at Monopoly a few more times. I think it's something about the way she bats her eyes when she can't come up with the rent that does me in.

I might even be able to coax her back into the ocean sometime this week, if the jellyfish sting didn't put her off the idea forever. There won't be that many opportunities left this year.

2007-09-01T18:51:00.000-05:00

Current favorite song:
"Massive Nights" by The Hold Steady

2007-09-01T11:12:00.000-05:00

Library book sales have to be the best thing since sliced bananas. For a grand total of $2.75, I was able to read (and keep!) 6 great books in the last month, and I've just started a new one. I can recommend without hesitation The Shipping News, Eating Mammals, The Book of Guys, The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency and Goodbye, Mr. Chips. Just so-so was Accordion Crimes. My favorite passage from the No. 1 Ladies:

Really, there was nothing that she felt she had to hide.

Now constipation was quite a different matter. It would be dreadful for the whole world to know about troubles of that nature. She felt terribly sorry for people who suffered from constipation, and she knew that there were many who did. There were probably enough of them to form a political party -- with a chance of government perhaps -- but what would such a party do if it was in power? Nothing, she imagined. It would try to pass legislation, but would fail.

Now it's on to the sequel. Library sales are my favorite.

2007-08-31T15:23:00.001-05:00

Today's column from David Brooks:

Every year we go to the beach, and every year it becomes more obvious that beach vacations are a metaphor for the human predicament.

Ooh! A metaphor! How far can we stretch it?

For while in his soul the contemporary man seeks to realize the loftiness of his essential nature, in actual life he finds himself whacking a ball against the windmill arm in an eternal game of mini golf.

Is that it? Will it snap? Can we possibly take this any further?

Middle-aged man seeks the spiritual grandeur of a mountain vacation but is trapped in the saltwater taffy of a beach vacation.

Can there be more? Is it even be more comparisons to be made?

Our lesser self is our beach self, which is a banal bimbo-ized version of the person we think we are. Our beach self munches on cheese fries while browsing through strip malls of unnecessary objects. Our beach self suffers from sandzheimers syndrome, which is manifested by the tendency to spend hours staring at oncoming waves, making scientific observations like, ``Here comes a big one.''

Summer must be a slow time for columnists.

2007-08-28T22:37:00.000-05:00

I feel I'm finally coming into my musical own. Not that I have any musical talent. Kelsey can attest to the fact that my singing voice mainly conists of a nasal falsetto that I warble Christmas carols in. No, I'm finally finding music for myself that I like.

Growing up there were two types of music in the Golden household: gospel (The Cathedrals) and folk music (Harry Chapin). I still enjoy Harry Chapin and Carole King. And, in the right mood, I can appreciate the harmony of a good gospel quartet. Hitting the teenage years, I was firmly ensconced in the contemporary Christian music scene. DC-Talk, the Newsboys, Audio Adrenaline were my bands of choice. And while they're not horrible, looking back at them now I find schmaltzy lyrics, bad cliches and sloppy, heavy-handed melodies. But then, those are the sort of things that actually appeal to teens.

Off to college and all of a sudden a whole new musical world opened up. I discovered there was much more out there than Christian knock-offs of popular music, and I found the popular music itself. I devoured Green Day, Offspring, Live, Rage Against the Machine and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. It seemed that everybody else was 5 years ahead of me. If it wasn't in a movie soundtrack I totally missed every popular song of the '90s. It took me years to rediscover bands that had been hot, had their one-hit wonder and died out a decade ago. Then Dave introduced me to punk. And I took in Bad Religion, the Ramones, Black Flag and Die Toten Hosen.

At this point, I listened to anybody who had suggestions on music. Coming from a background where I had very little exposure to different styles or genres, I was willing to try pretty much anything. I didn't like all of it, but I tried. I went through a lot of phases. There was the pop era. The pop-punk era. The punk era. The rapcore era. The new age era. The hard rock era. The classic rock era. The singer-songwriter era. So much to listen to; going to college and finding all this free music (I was a bad bad man) was like being exposed to a whole library of books I didn't even know existed.

But upon graduating, I still didn't really have a sense of what I really liked. And I wasn't confident enough in my musical taste to support any opinions. There were certainly some bands I enjoyed more than others. But I couldn't tell people why I liked They Might Be Giants more than System of a Down, or why I had a soft spot for Kid Rock, but didn't really appreciate Eminem.

I met and married Kelsey, and she exposed me to even more great music, Le Tigre, Ryan Adams, The Proclaimers. And finally, I started finding my own taste. It's probably a process everybody goes through. First enjoying music because everybody else does. Then enjoying a genre that your friends recommend. Then picking the music you like and not caring if other people think you're weird for listening to The Born Again Floozies. I'm sure I'm not alone. I'm also guessing I was never as behind as I thought I was. Those years of back catalogues of thousands of artists you've never even heard of are just a little intimidating at first.

But I think I found the secret. It doesn't really matter if you're an expert on alt.country or Phish's biggest fan. Nobody cares. Nobody will even remember. What matters is that you close your eyes, tap your toes, hum along and dance to the music.

2007-08-26T19:52:00.000-05:00

Kelsey and I are getting old. We shake our wrinkly fists at the wall when the young'uns next door make noise at 1 in the morning. We scowl at the whippersnappers zipping around the streets on their crotch rockets. And we just don't appreciate MTV at all.

We were invited to a going-away party on Friday night for one of my colleagues on the copy desk. Working at night, we're used to staying up pretty late, and the revelry wasn't even scheduled to start until midnight. Unfortunately, Friday night was my night to stick around at the paper until the first copies actually started rolling off the presses and make one last check. And on Friday night, the people manning the presses got off to a late start. A very late start. Most nights, we finish up around midnight and the presses start spitting out papers around 12:15. On Friday, after a series of unfortunate events, the presses didn't start until 1:40. I didn't get home until around 2.

Being the old duffers that we are, Kelsey and I decided to call it a night and pack it in. We couldn't imagine the party would actually drag on that much longer. I didn't want us to be those people who show up right when the place is winding down and everybody's thinking of leaving. And then all of a sudden everybody has to stick around another 30 minutes just to be polite. So we went to bed.

Lo and behold, come Saturday I find out that the merriment continued until 9 in the morning. We went to bed just as the fun was getting started. Upon being told, Kelsey said, "Ugh. I'm too old for that."

2007-08-24T22:17:00.000-05:00

Today's lesson:
When putting on new socks, make sure the sticker ends up in the trash. Do not lay it on the bed, where it could end up on the back of your pants.
I spent 6 hours at work today walking around with my butt advertising its "Oooh! Ahh! Cushioned comfort."

2007-08-23T16:47:00.001-05:00

It is yet another measure of how far our culture has fallen when The Associated Press sends out a nationwide NewsAlert that "Lindsay Lohan has reached a plea deal."